Figlio Lacrimosa della Notte
by EulaliaGal
Summary: After all, Lovino is only a little boy; and it's so much easier to cry at night.


**N**obody knows, but Lovino cries under the velvet cover of night. It's a clandestine event; only the moon watches sneeringly from the raven-winged skies at the little boy who never grew up_ (as the world did around him)_. She is the only onlooker to this one weakness of his, and still she gazes back at him in ill-humour, wishing to divert her prying eyes elsewhere; but he knows as well as any that there is something sordid and ever so addictive about watching the human flaws under the mask, watching the proud façade shatter and reveal tears and shards of memories.

_(Something ever so addictive about watching Spain's rise, Spain's fall, Spain's multifaceted enigma of an existence.)_

It's strange, but he's always found something so inherently _shameful_ about allowing his tears to fall in the light of day; to allow the glaring sun bedazzle your eyes as it crystallizes tears into diamonds. He often indulged in such bouts when younger; but then he grew up, and now he sees pity and scorn in the eyes of his peers, so it's suddenly so much more painful to weep before those he loves and derides than crying unnoticed in the night. His brother can force tears to fall at the drop of the hat; but Lovino, he bottles it up and allows all the tears to spill over at night.

And indeed the cup does spill over, and the sobs fall over each other to tear themselves out of Lovino's throat. He cries himself raw as they tumble into one another, a seething, broiling mass of rolling, bursting, choking sobs; crashing against his throttled lungs like the black sea in the midnight storm, wrenching at his pulsating heart like a ship on the storm-tossed sea.

It hurts his chest to cry so – the heaving movements make him sick, weak, frail, more a boy than a country – but it hurts his pride all the more as the tears fall and his heart is atremble with dreadful anticipation. He wants Spain to find him, he doesn't want Spain to find him; he wants to talk to somebody _(anybody, everybody)_, he doesn't want to talk to somebody; he wants wine and companionship on warm summer evenings, he doesn't want champagne and false smiles on frosty winter morns.

He's drowning in his sorrows.

He cries as if he's ashamed; he cries as if he wants nothing more than for the tears to go away. He cries and he cries and he cries as the tears run capriciously down his face, lancing his eyes and burning his cheeks in shame. The prickle of hot tears remind him how ugly he must look now, all scrunched up faces and gaping mouths; silent sobs hang in the air from silken nooses, and the room is stifling in its long-forgotten grief.

He is always crying, in his soul; the rain never stops and the sun never shines. Not when his most beloved brother is right there beside him, soaking up the sun and dancing in the rain. Not when Spain puts strong arms around him and whispers sweet nothings, all the while seeing his brother in him. Not when he knows he's not wanted, he's never wanted, and it's just a vicious cycle.

If he was strong enough, he would break out of this crystal prison; but he's not, he's weak and cowardly, not even brave enough to show his true face.

So he's slowly drowning as the tears accumulate in his prison and hourglass; they will not drain out, and air will not get in. It is his punishment; the punishment of the Lord Almighty for falling from grace and embracing the Devil. His punishment for being so proud, so greedy; so cowardly, so weak; so envious, so lustful. But most of all it's his punishment for those strange, strange stirrings he feels when Spain is near and whispers sweet nothings in his ear; those strange, strange feelings that make him wish to see France dangling from a tree and his own beloved brother limb-torn and bone-shattered.

This is what keeps him crying, the knowledge that he must do so as to inflict God's punishment unto himself; and not because it's sweet and pure in its transcendental pain, because it scours his diseased throat and lungs _(for they must be diseased if he can never say what he wants to)_ with chemicals that burn and tear his throat raw, because then the crushing pain his heart pulsates with will never need to be brought up, faced up to, resolved.


End file.
